Essay: Pros of Green Revolution

With the rapid growth of our global population pouring into the next millennium, we will witness an ever-growing hunger rate around the world. That is unless we call for a revolution on the global scale. The Green Revolution which already sprouted in the early part of the century only need to add a bit more momentum and we will see a bright future for the human race, a future without hunger and starvation ¡V hopefully.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for the planet to support its overwhelming population. And since the amount of arable land available is becoming scarce, we must seek ways to dramatically improve crop yields of existing cropland. By implementing new farming techniques provided with the new technological advances in machines we can see abundant harvest in even the poorest third world countries. For example, the Green Revolution has already showed admirable progress in the northern part of India ever since it took start in 1950. By 1997, northern India increased its grain production by 37 percent. This has proven that traditional farming methods are being rendered obsolete. And because by the year 2000, there will be half the land per person in developing countries as there was in 1970, we need to apply ultra-efficient methods to sustain the growing need.

Not only does the Green Revolution enhances food output, it also preserves the environment. Traditional agriculture requires massive forest and grassland removal to obtain land necessary to farm on. Deforestation and overgrazing has caused erosion flooding, and enabled the expansion of deserts. But with drainage systems, leveling, and irrigation provided by the Green Rev, all this terra deforming will unlikely happen again. We can retain clean air and lessen the global warming effect caused by deforestation.

Many people argue that a revamp in agriculture will be way too expensive and unrealistic especially for those poor farmers in third world countries. However many times, they exaggerate the price. In reality, farmers who take the first step in the revolution will most likely succeed and will have more money to invest in further development such as irrigation systems and wells and machineries. And since poverty is caused by low productivity of food which results in over expensive food prices, we can eliminate this problem by raising crop yields.

We don’t have much time and room to speculate on this issue. The turn of the century is approaching quickly and so is overpopulation. What we should be speculating on is how the development process proceeds not should it proceed. The Industrial Revolution altered the world one step ahead. The Green Revolution will take the next.